Well it’s Christmas! And that means it’s time for us here at Good Show Sir to take a little break. We’ll be off all next week but back on the 1st January with a special look back at the years best.

So where would sci-fi be without Star Trek? We’d have slightly less hamming and a lot less terrible franchise novels to be fair. Here are some we picked up in a second hand store and they are just fantastic.

Scotty is looking at Georgy LaFeorgy and saying, “Who are you calling a relic?” The lady next to Spock seems to have mauve horns and a colourful trifle on her head.

Behind the bare-pated, traditional Picard is a rarely seen full-head-of-hair version; perhaps the transporter has inadvertently blended Jean-Luc with James T Kirk. In which case the companion volume to this should show curly-haired Kirk backed by a bareheaded version of Willy Shatner.

And I used to OWN a copy of that STAR TREK LOG 5 book. That’s one book I would NOT want to be seen reading.

“Alan Dean Foster…Star Trek…LOGS…a plastic model of the Enterprise…these were the four things that passed through my head as I pulled the lever, dropping a colossal planet-busting turd onto the planet Earth. No great loss.”

I read ‘Spock, Messiah!’ back when it first came out (1976), and rather enjoyed it. Many years later, watching the abomination that was ‘Star Trek V’, I couldn’t help thinking the film – looked – very much the way I visualised this novel, even encompassing similar themes, and that in all probability they’d have had a better movie if Shatner’s vanity script were dropped and they’d filmed this instead!